Yesterday the Maybrit Illner talkshow on ZDF television was about Germany’s attempt to shift to renewable energy in the wake of the shutdown of 7 nuclear power reactors after the Fukushima tsunami disaster.

The political talkshow, moderated by Maybrit Illner, asked if consumers are being asked to pay too much for the transition to a power supply based on renewable energies. Electricity rates have jumped 15% in Germany in just 2 years. Interesting were the comments from German Environment Minister, Norbert Röttgen. In the past he always based the need to switch to renewable energy on “climate change”. Not anymore it seems. Except maybe once in passing, Röttgen didn’t mention the word “climate” once. In fact no one uttered it. It appears that protecting climate has lost its appeal.

So what could be driving the change over to renewable energy if it isn’t the climate? Röttgen cited two reasons: 1) The need to get off nuclear power and 2) the fact that fossil fuels are resources on Earth that are limited. No mention of climate. Suddenly climate change is losing its urgency.

The other members of the talkshow included a Karl Marx look-alike (Michael Sladek) who demands that power generation be taken away from big corporations and be decentralized by putting it in the hands of private individuals. Isn’t that what mankind did thousands of years ago when everyone had his own campfire?

Another guest was an anti-nuclear power activist who claimed that nuclear power was too dangerous and thus had to be stopped. She said the same thing about 10 times, but used different words each time.

The director EON was also a guest and he was content to perch himself high up on the fence, not taking any sides at all. I found his performance spineless. The other guest was Dirk Maxeiner, a long-time critic of the green movement. Citing biogas and windmills, he claimed that the green movement did more harm than good to the environment. He’s right of course.

Is Schellnhuber discretely changing the timescale?

Reader asmilwho informs that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber was interviewd on German radio this morning. As I listened to the director of the alamist fantasy factory Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, I couldn’t help but notice that he seems to have modified his tune when it comes to a timetable for his envisioned “Great Transformation of Society” and climate urgency overall (emphasis added):

For the most part the course has to be set over the next 20 years for an almost carbon-free world economy.”

Now it’s two decades “to set the course” to transform society, and not to actually transform it. It turns out that some countries like Germany, Spain and Italy, all set their green course years ago, and all have since discovered that it’s too expensive to follow. Thus they’ve since begun to abandon these courses by cutting back on or eliminating the subsidies that had been designed to keep them on their courses to begin with. The “course” to transform society turned out to be a path to failure and had to be abandoned.

“Setting the course for a renewable energy economy” over the next 20 years is not going to curb global CO2 emissions at all. China, India and the rest of the booming developing world aren’t going to accept delaying any longer the prosperity that the western world has been enjoying for over half a century. Poverty cannot pay for expensive energy. The path to renewable energy can only go through prosperity, and the path to prosperity is paved with cheap energy. The developing world is not going to abstain from using cheap fossil fuels. Thus CO2 concentrations will certainly continue their rise. In 10 years it’ll be clear what the real impact of CO2 on climate truly is.

Another misleading comment Schellnhuber makes is claiming that “surveys show globally that 90% of the population wants the transition renewable energies”. Well if they’re cheap and plentiful, who doesn’t? But the reality is that these energy sources are still astronomically expensive and cause more environmental destruction than protection. They cannot lift countries out of poverty.

10 responses to “The “Climate” Word Now Getting Dropped From Discussions About Energy In Germany”

They know that climate alarmism is now a poisoned chalice, but those who have benefitted from it greatly in terms of power and position will try new spins to seek even more. ‘Sustainable development’ is the general catch-all for that, and seems likely to dominate the next IPCC reports. The climate system has been so convincing in its refusal to follow the alarmist line, that it would be easy to believe that Mother Nature herself has chosen sides in this ‘debate’, and that makes screeching that you can hear the horsemen of the apocalypse seem a bit silly. In the UK, Paul Nurse of the Royal Society has recently distanced himself from gross alarmism, as has Met Office apparatchik Vicky Pope. Their organisations have benefitted financially from the scare-them-witless phase, and now they may want to secure their gains by trying to look moderate and reasonable. I think they will probably get away with that too, given the past success of the alarmist lobby – the one thing they are very very good at it is fooling the mass-media and the politicians.

What scientist would want to go down in history as being totally and stupidly wrong?
That’s what many are setting themselves up to be. It’s one thing to be wrong and then admit it, and to then get on with the show. But it’s stupid not to admit plain errors.

The news from Australia is that the Queensland state elections have resulted in a landslide with the left parties swept almost completely out of Parliament.

The joke going around is “It’s confirmed….. a Toyota Tarago has more seats than the Queensland Labor Party” (“Tarago” was a small people-mover bus in Australia) They have 6 seats in Parliament, confirmed at the end of tonight’s count.

Queensland is Australia’s other major exporter of minerals (esp. coal) and has put up with lies and incompetence under the left-biased Labor Party for more than a decade. Floods in 2011 devasted large areas of the State, including the capital Brisbane; with the flooding of Brisbane resulting from government induced incompetence in the running of the dams which were supposed to ameliorate flooding.

I agree. There seems to be trouble ahead for our warmies. The only trouble here in Germany is that our major parties all jumped the AGW bandwagon. So we need a grass roots movement to change the German energy aberration. Vahrenholt’s book “Die kalte Sonne” stated more than 85% of CO2 is from countries that refrain CO2 regulation.

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